For this fifth week, we were asked to go and visit the Branding Museum in Ladbroke Grove (W11). This museum is specialised in branding, tracing the history of branding the 1830’s till now, the exhibition is the structure like a chronological tunnel starting in 1837 till today. The aim of this permanent exhibition is to show to the public the evolution through the past 180 years.

Entering this tunnel we start at the victorian period, the beginning of the first industrial era, one of the major period witches still has effects on our today's life. The exhibition is the large collection of grocery products, magazines, cigarettes, iconic objects such as radios, computers, televisions…, toys and all another kind of merchandises.

The general comment I can make on this exhibition is that branding has changed in several ways, but within the years, centuries just the communications methods have changed, especially in the last 25 years with the internet. Also the design has changed, in the 1830’s there was no television so advertising and branding had to be bolder than now, if you look some products from the 1920’s the box of the item was mostly composed of illustration demonstrating how to use the product, today the brand highlight more the experience and the benefits of the products.
Only on certain kinds of products not much has changed, like for cleaning/maintenance products and toys, this is due to the specificity of the product because they still need to show how we consumers need to use it and how good it is to use this product. Same for kids toys, most of the toy boxes displayed showed very childish graphics, bold and colourful typefaces, the thing that attracts kids attention.

To conclude I would say that this museum makes me realise that the branding techniques haven’t drastically changed, they just went through the society evolution, with the democratisation of the television in the 1970’s, and the internet in the 1990’s which were just new support, that gave unlimited new ways of branding.